Category Archives: tortfeasor

I’m happy to see that people like my Competitive Justice t-shirt. Sua Sponte calls it a “must have” and Sapere aude and jd2b have both been kind enough to make announcements. Raymond Chandler and Hear Ye! also approve. Meanwhile, others think that tortfeasor shirts (generally – not necessarily the new style) increase one’s loser quotient. That’s part of the idea of course – nerdy shirts for nerds that happen to be cool.

Things have been somewhat quiet around tortfeasor lately. Behind the serenity, I’ve been working hard to bring you a brand new t-shirt design. I wanted to make a shirt that was a little more subtle than a giant “tortfeasor” across one’s chest, and I came up with the idea to make a parody of a sports logo. This, of course, has been done before – I’ve seen everything from skateboards to PlayStation controllers with the blue and red background. I thought there was something especially amusing about lawyering as a sport though. Lawyers are known for working hard, but the type of work doesn’t usually lead one to sweat and loss of breath.
The new shirt is available as of today. I’m happy to say that, despite the high quality manufacturing (screen printed – none of this CafePress iron on stuff) and colorful design, I’m still able to offer shirts for a reasonable price.
Thanks to Orville Esoy for helping with the design.

tortfeasor has had a new site for about a week now, but I haven’t yet mentioned it here yet. The design is similar to the old one, but it’s done using css for positioning instead of tables. Not unlike the site you’re at right now (more on this site’s design).
One of the new features of the site is that there is a place for tortfeasor news. I was amused last week when a picture of no less than seven satisfied tortfeasor customers showed up in my inbox – so it’s on the news page for now.
Okay – that’s it for web projects for a while – time to review the ole’ European Community Treaty. Exams come at strange times in the Netherlands.

Thursday’s New York Times had an article about scanning people to produce a database of sizes and measurements for clothing manufacturers. I hadn’t thought about sizes much until starting tortfeasor. People are always emailing me asking what size shirt they should buy. Isn’t the buyer in a better position to figure this out?
People come in all different shapes, and I’ve never understood why women’s clothes use arbitrary “size” measurements instead of actual inches or centimeters.
I think t-shirts are fairly standard across brands in terms of sizes though. I always ask for a large shirt, but an XL suits me just fine too. When setting up tortfeasor, I assumed that “large” was the average size and I printed an approximate bell curve of sizes. The first two orders (to a couple friends) were for a small and XXL shirt. Luckily, purchases did converge on large, but the extremities (small and XXL) do sell better than I thought they would.
I noticed an interesting phenomenon lately about the XXL shirts (currently sold out, but a new run should be printed very soon). I used to charge more for XXL because they cost more to make (more material), but it got somewhat complicated. In the process of raising all the prices a little and reducing shipping prices, I set all sizes to the same (increased) price. XXL sales immediately surged despite being more expensive than before. Another interesting fact: people tend to buy more than one XXL shirt at a time. Most of the recent XXL sales have been for two (sometimes more) shirts.

I’m excited to be offering black tortfeasor shirts over at tortfeasor.com. They’re just like the white shirts, but the black color looks incredible with white print. I’m really surprised how well they turned out.
The black shirts have already been selling well among friends and previous customers, so it’s time to open up sales to everyone.

Tortfeasor shirts get their first printed press mention this month as the September edition of The National Jurist magazine hits law schools. (Actually, I think the affiliated preLaw magazine was out first, which also contains a mention.) Thanks to both magazines for the support. Tortfeasor shirts have been selling well since school started. Remember, I disclaim all responsibility for any professors calling on you as a result of seeing the shirt.
Have a look at page 10 of The National Jurist:

There are a lot of law school first days coming up (BU starts on Monday). I was amazed to read that a reference to a Tortfeasor shirt has made it into Lonestar’s orientation packet! “You know you’re that guy/girl when you’re wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Tortfeasor’.”

I’m happy to announce that tortfeasor.com is a success. I’ve sold enough shirts to pay back the site costs and, more importantly, the shirt printing costs. If sales continue at the current rate, there should be more colors and designs in the future. Strangely, the small an XXL shirts are much more popular than I anticipated. Apparently, most tortfeasor’s are either tiny or gigantic.